China’s Fifteen-Billion-Dollar Purge

Imagine that Barack Obama, within a year of assuming the Presidency, quietly detained Dick Cheney—or Al Gore, if you prefer (partisan differences are not the point)—and seized his assets. From there, picture the new President moving outward, first detaining Lynne Cheney and the Cheneys’ daughters, then the daughters’ spouses, and then their drivers and secretaries and bodyguards, a broad range of senior executives from Cheney’s Halliburton days, and, finally, hundreds of businesspeople and officials who owed their careers to the powerful political family. This is, in effect, what we’re seeing in China today, and the question is what kind of political culture the purge will leave behind.

In less than two years, the Chinese government has brought low one of its most powerful figures: the former oilman and security hawk Zhou Yongkang. Zhou was not the Vice-President, but, as recently as the beginning of 2012, he was “arguably the most powerful man in China,” as the Financial Times put it. Born in a village of beet farmers, he rose through the ranks of the China National Petroleum Corporation and reached the highest levels of the Communist Party: the Standing Committee of the Politburo, where he gained control of domestic security. He was responsible for a vast apparatus dedicated to spying on China’s citizens and putting down protests, and he enjoyed a larger budget than that of the military. (As a result, in the words of the F.T., “his trove of compromising secret files on influential people drew comparisons to another American: J. Edgar Hoover.”)

But today Zhou is poised to become the most senior official to be removed on corruption charges since the birth of the People’s Republic, in 1949. After months of rumors, the purported details of Zhou’s collapsing empire have been widely published in recent days, a sign that the government is preparing to make his arrest public. According to various reports, at least ten of Zhou’s relatives have been detained, included his brother, his wife, and his son. His son’s wife, a Chinese-American named Fiona Huang Wan, who once co-produced a Chinese television series called “Police Story,” has been unreachable since October, her mother told a reporter.

The purge has extended to offices that were once out of the reach of ordinary anti-corruption campaigns, reportedly encompassing Jiang Jiemin, formerly the chairman of both the state energy giant PetroChina and its parent, China National Petroleum Corporation, and Li Dongsheng, a propagandist turned vice-minister of public security. Li was a senior official in the state television system, where, the F.T. noted, his duties reportedly included introducing senior Party leaders “to attractive young female reporters and anchors from the station.” (Zhou is married to a former television host.)

In all, more than three hundred relatives, allies, and associates have been detained in the past four months, according to Reuters. Investigators have frozen bank accounts; seized securities, jewels, and gold bullion; and “confiscated about three hundred apartments and villas, antiques and contemporary paintings and more than sixty vehicles.” Even by the standards of Chinese-élite politics, the haul is impressive; Reuters reports that the seized assets have a combined value of at least ninety billion yuan—fifteen billion U.S. dollars. There is much that we still don’t know about these assets—how many of them are held by businesses, for instance, and which are tied directly to the Zhou family—but it’s worth pausing on the fact that a group of Chinese civil servants and their associates seem to have accrued a nest egg that is somewhat larger than the gross national product of Albania.

Now on to the questions: Why take Zhou down now? For President Xi Jinping, Zhou’s downfall serves both practical and strategic purposes. The Zhou network runs powerful entities, including oil, gas, and security, and Xi’s maneuver means that he can shore up his authority by replacing Zhou’s allies with his own loyalists, as well as scare low-ranking fence-sitters into something closer to coöperation.

On Monday, in a parallel case, Xi’s government charged Lieutenant General Gu Junshan with bribery, embezzlement, misuse of state funds, and abuse of power in what Jonathan Ansfield, of the Times, says “may be the biggest corruption scandal to engulf the Chinese military.” In recent years, it has become an open secret that the People’s Liberation Army is riddled with bribery, corruption, and for-sale jobs. General Gu, who was the deputy chief of the Army’s logistics department—a position that gave him sweeping control over procurement in the world’s largest army—was said to be one of the most diligent practitioners of the buying and selling of rank. When investigators raided his home village, they needed four trucks to cart off his baubles, which reportedly included a gold statue of Chairman Mao. For a President who has vowed repeatedly to give China a more powerful military presence in the world, an army racked by corruption was another practical problem that needed to be solved.

Strategically, Zhou and Gu are among the largest targets on the block; if Xi is going to take down anyone in his anti-corruption drive, he gains the most authority by going after the biggest names. By confronting high-ranking “tigers,” as he calls them, he hopes to put a symbolic face on a campaign that has also resulted in the detention of tens of thousands of low-ranking “flies.”

Will this work? By highlighting spectacular acts of kleptocracy, doesn’t the Chinese President run the risk of outraging the public more than satisfying it? The answer, of course, is yes, which underscores the radical gamble at the heart of Xi’s bid to restore the credibility of the Communist Party in the eyes of Chinese citizens.

Xi has arrested dissidents and narrowed the room for expression on the Internet while, at the same time, he has isolated and severed a part of his own organization. This is the political equivalent of a body responding to hypothermia: he is reducing blood flow to the appendages in an effort to fortify the central organs. The question, which we cannot yet answer, is just how cold it will become; in other words, whether the penetration of corruption into society is so deep and destructive that has passed the point of remedy.

In the past, the Party insured its survival by shedding its ideology, then its economic principles. Now it seems to be going after those whose takings are so visible that they undermine national security, either by inflaming domestic dissatisfaction or by weakening the military. Xi is betting that he can keep the public focussed on these figures and on their purported acts of iniquity, rather than on the political culture that produced them.

In moments like this, it’s worth remembering words attributed to Chen Yun, the former Party elder: “Fight corruption too little and destroy the country; fight it too much and destroy the Party.”

Above: Zhou Yongkang attends the closing ceremony of the National People’s Congress; Beijing, March 14, 2012. Photograph by Jason Lee/Reuters.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.